|
For the 4 1/2 years of my PhD, I worked with a de-identified dataset that felt like nothing more than numbers on a page. Cold. Abstract. Disconnected from any real human experience. Each “person” was just a line in an Excel spreadsheet, with an ID in place of a name. When I started my first role in insurance pricing, my mindset initially remained the same. That was until my boss took me along to speak to a policyholder - putting me face-to-face with one of the people my data actually represented. I sat across from a man who was running a business that was struggling to make ends meet - one of the few Australian manufacturing companies that was adamant their product would continue to remain Australian-made. The premium increase that I didn’t think twice about when performing the calculation was causing him genuine financial distress. As he told his story, I could see him blinking back tears at times. That day, everything changed for me. I realised my data was more than just numbers - it represented actual human beings, with emotions and struggles, who behave in sometimes unpredictable ways. This lesson has became even more relevant as I’ve watched our world become increasingly app-driven. Today, understanding the human behaviour behind every click, scroll, and purchase has become absolutely critical for business success. That’s exactly what we dive into in the latest episode of Value Driven Data Science, where I’m joined by Miguel Curiel, Product Analytics Manager at Bloomberg. In our conversation, Miguel breaks down:
Miguel is currently writing his own book on product analytics, so you’re getting insights from someone literally writing the playbook on this emerging field. If you’ve ever wondered how Netflix knows exactly what to recommend next, or how companies like Bloomberg optimize their digital products, this episode pulls back the curtain on the human psychology driving those decisions. Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or click the link below: Episode 84: The 7-Step Checklist for Creating Business Impact Through Product Analytics Talk again soon, Dr Genevieve Hayes |
Twice weekly, I share proven strategies to help data scientists get noticed, promoted, and valued. No theory — just practical steps to transform your technical expertise into business impact and the freedom to call your own shots.
ChatGPT just got destroyed at chess by a 46-year-old Atari 2600 console. And as someone who owned that exact console as a kid, I find this absolutely hilarious. My Atari 2600 was a hand-me-down from my cousin. And even as a kid in the early 1990s, I could see it wasn’t great. By today’s standards, though, it seems far, far worse. The Atari 2600 has about 1/250,000 the processing power of an iPhone 15 Pro. By comparison, ChatGPT runs on data centres worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet,...
Growing up, my parents had arts degrees and couldn’t understand a word I said about maths or science. Every dinner conversation went something like this: My parents: “What did you learn at school today?” Me: “In maths, we learned about differential equations.” My parents: 😕 “So… is that a good thing or a bad thing?” At the time, I thought this was incredibly frustrating. However, I now realise it was the best training I could have gotten for my data science career. Because when you spend...
I’ve made three major career pivots in data science. None of them involved climbing a ladder. I thought academia was going to be my forever job. I imagined being in a university until the day I retired - possibly until I died, because academics last forever. Then I got to the end of my PhD and realised: I don’t actually want to spend the rest of my life in school. So, I made my first career pivot - from academic to insurance pricing manager. A few years later, I heard about this exciting new...